But it was easy to wind Jack up during the shows, and the boys would always pull different tricks on him to get him going.
Once in Miami, Mick Foley (who has never beaten me in a wrestling match) walked through the curtain on his way to the ring and said, “Watch how Lanza reacts to this!” He grabbed the mic and told 15,000 fans how he was at the beach that day and a fan ran up to him with a copy of Have a Nice Day (available at fine bookstores near you). But before he was able to get it signed, he slipped in a puddle of suntan lotion that Mick had carelessly left on the beach. The guy fell down hard and threw his back out. As he was lying there writhing in pain, he looked up and said, “Mick, I can’t make it to the show tonight.” Mick was devastated and told him, “I’m so sorry you can’t make it, is there anything I can do?” The guy said, “Yes, Mick—win one for the Slipper.”
My gorgeous wife with her second favorite wrestler backstage at Wrestlemania 2000. By the way, Foley has never beaten her or any other member of the Jericho family in a wrestling match.
Seven of the 15,000 people chuckled as the rest of them sat in silent indifference. Lanza threw his cigarette to the ground in disgust and screamed, “What the fuck is he doing??”
When Mick came through the curtain I told him about Jack’s reaction, to which Mick responded with a big grin: “Yes! Victory!”
Boring and confusing 15,000 people was worth it to piss off Lanza.
Ever since Mick helped me get into ECW, he had always kept an eye on me, and during those tumultuous first months in the WWE he was one of the few guys who tried to help me. Mick and I wrestled each other in St. Louis right around the time that Have a Nice Day was released. The finish of the match saw me hitting him over his head with his own book, knocking him out, and allowing me to get the 1-2-3. (Yet another Jericho win over Foley.)
Afterwards he told me, “I don’t mind if you kick and punch me as hard as you can, but you might not want to be that solid with the other guys, some of them might complain about getting stiffed the way you stiffed me tonight.”
He was right in saying that my style was hard hitting from years of working with guys like Chris Benoit, Eddy Guerrero, Ultimo Dragon, and Rey Mysterio. That was Mick’s nice way of telling me that I better lighten up a bit if I wanted to work with the big boys in the WWE. I appreciated his honesty and was able to tweak my work as a result. I paid Mick back for his kindness the next night on Raw, when I told him the only reason I had read his book was to see if he died at the end of it. (Did I mention I’m undefeated against Foley?)
A few weeks later on a chilly fall afternoon, I arrived at the Meadowlands Arena in New Jersey and found out that Vince Russo had quit the WWE and jumped to WCW. It seemed like a huge blow to the company at first because he took a lot of credit for being the main architect of the Attitude Era. But Vinny Mac and the rest of the front office weren’t so worried because they knew that wasn’t the case.
I asked Pat, “What do you think is going to happen?”
“I’ve seen them come and I’ve seen them go, it doesn’t make a difference. As long as Vince McMahon is here, it’s going to be okay. No big deal.”
But it was a big deal to me, as Russo was the one who had brought me into the WWE and was my biggest supporter in the company. He was the middleman between Vince and me. The guy who constantly backed me up when Vince thought I wasn’t good enough to cut it. Russo believed in me and treated me with the respect of a top guy.
Now he was gone.
Sure, he dug me into a bit of a hole with all of his preposterous cartoon ideas. But at least I had a story, a presence on the show and a raison d’être. Things in the WWE were already bad for me as it was, but now I was really up shit creek—and my paddle had just floated away to WCW.
Russo’s leaving meant the end of whatever kind of push I was getting, and I soon became a denizen of Sunday Night Heat. I worked with such luminaries as Stevie Richards, Godfather, Gangrel, the Headbangers, Bull Buchanan, and Naked Mideon, losing to all of them. Only three months earlier the clock had hit zero in the middle of The Rock’s promo, yet now I was washed up at at the ripe old age of twenty-nine.
My confidence was shot and I was scrambling, desperate to get some sort of recognition, some sort of credibility. I worked against Big Show on Raw in Greensboro, North Carolina, and had the idea to use the famous Antonio Inoki/Andre the Giant short-arm scissor spot, where I would put him into an arm lock and he would use his immense strength to lift me straight off the ground up onto his shoulders, seven feet in the air. Proud of my originality and technical prowess, I went to Vince and bragged, “I’m doing the short-arm scissors tonight,” trying to impress him any way I could.
Then I fucked up the short-arm scissors and slapped Show squarely in the face to make up for it. He was furious about it and tore the dressing room wall down in a blind fury. Then he ripped the stereo out of his rental car. When he told Ron Simmons what he had done, Ron looked him in the face and deadpanned, “So you went into your own car and smashed in your own stereo?”
“Yes!!!”
“Damn, you sure showed him …”
I embarrassed myself even further when Arnold Schwarzenegger made a guest appearance on Smackdown! to promote his movie End of Days. In the film, he plays a character named Jericho Kane, and I instantly figured that because we were both Jerichos (You’re a Jericho, I’m a Jericho, that’s terrific) it would be obvious for us to do something together. (Keep in mind that I was losing to Headbanger Mosh that night.) So I wrote a detailed, intricate storyline for the two of us and handed it to Vince. He looked at it as if I had written it with a poop pen and told me he was looking forward to reading it. He must’ve perused it very quickly, because I saw it in a garbage can forty-five minutes later.
My storyline with Schwarzenegger had been terminated forever. (Cocky Author’s Note: Yeah, it’s clichéd, but it’s my book so deal with it.)
Even though Vince had squashed my proposed angle with Arnold, I still had to meet him. He was one of my heroes growing up and I didn’t know if I’d ever get another chance. The Schwarz had been sequestered in his dressing room all day long, but I was not to be deterred. I walked over to his door, gave a terse knock, and barged inside.
Arnold was sitting there with his entourage and they all stared at me, annoyed. A nervous grin spread across my face as I said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Schwarzenegger, I hate to interrupt you, but I just wanted to say hi.” He looked at me, his face chiseled out of granite, and replied stoically in his thick Aryan accent, “Absolutely.”
“Are you having a good time today?”
“Absolutely.”
“That’s great. Are you ready to tear it up tonight?”
“Absolutely.”
“Does your mother like bananas?”
“Absolutely.”
“Do you mind if I take a picture with you?”
“Absolutely.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant absolutely yes or absolutely no, but I went ahead and took the picture anyway.
“Thank you so much, Mr. Schwarzenegger.”
“Absolutely.”
I lingered for a few seconds longer, waiting for Arnold to crack a smile or a frown or a grimace—anything to show me that he was human. But he didn’t. He stared at me stone-faced until I skulked out of his room and out of his life forever.
I won’t be back.
Even though my first idea had ended up in the bin, I kept the hits coming. I wrote up ideas and gave them to Vince on a weekly basis, some of them good, some of them bad, all of them unused. One of my favorites was a story with Steve Austin where I would commandeer Raw and be in charge of everything, renaming it Raw Is Jericho. I would confront Austin, who would be in the ring at the beginning of the show, and shoot down the giant Raw Is War banner from the rafters with a bow and arrow, revealing a Raw Is Jericho banner instead. Later in the night I would kidnap Austin and throw him into the trunk of my car. At the end of the show he would use his own bow and arrow to pin
my shirt to the wall and proceed to stomp a mudhole into me.
What? You think that sucks?
Okay, I just reread that, and you’re right, it does suck. I wouldn’t have used it either, but at least I was trying.
As my stock was falling faster than a Bob Barker erection, the Hardy Boys, Edge, and Christian were becoming the hottest acts in the company. They wrestled in a best-of-seven series that culminated in a Ladder match at No Mercy 1999 and absolutely tore the house down. They became bigger stars in one night than I was after four months. What stung even worse was that these guys had asked me years earlier to help them get jobs in Japan and Mexico and they were now stealing a show that I wasn’t even booked on.
It was quite depressing, and I started to wonder if coming to the WWE hadn’t been a huge mistake.
I sat in front of the monitor watching the PPV and taking notes on a legal pad, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and why I was sitting on the sidelines. It was the same thing I did in WCW, when I watched the guys cut promos in the box so I could learn how to do them better.
After the show I made a point of approaching Vince in his office to tell him what I had been doing, how I’d been jotting down ideas while watching the show. I wasn’t looking to kiss his ass; I was just letting him know that I was trying. I’d been dreaming about working for the WWE for twenty years, had designed and cultivated my entire career to make it there, and now that I had finally arrived, my dreams were turning to dust.
The best part about taking notes at the monitor that night was watching my old friend Tyler Palko of the Okotoks Palkos (see the New York Times best-seller A Lion’s Tale by Chris Jericho for more info) and his seventy-five-year old Uncle Joe yelling and screaming at all of the action. Joe lived in Cleveland and Tyler had come to visit him and see me wrestle. He was just as disappointed that I wasn’t on the show as I was, so afterwards we went down to the bar district called the Flats to drown our sorrows in a bucket of Crown Royal. After a drink or ten, I was feeling so awful about the way things were going for me that I decided to take out my aggressions by pissing all over a defenseless 50-inch Samsung TV in the bar, turning it into HPee.
I drove back to Uncle Joe’s home totally loadski, which was totally dumbski, and I ended up knocking over his mailbox while pulling into the driveway. In the morning, Joe asked me if I knew anything about the fallen box.
“No, Uncle Joe. But there was a party going on down the street and I’ll bet it was one of those punk kids.”
Tyler knew how shmammered I’d been and asked, “Did you knock down the mailbox? Did you not knock down the mailbox?”, like he was George Costanza: “If you took the raisins, if you didn’t take the raisins …”
Okay, I admit it; I took the raisins and I knocked down the fucking mailbox. My job was tearing me apart at the seams and I had been reduced to taking out my aggressions on defenseless postal receptacles.
The next day, I showed up at the arena with a massive hangover and a massive chip on my shoulder. I was angry at the world, and when I heard Vince wanted to see me in his office I planned on telling him that I wanted a storyline and I didn’t care what it was about or who it was with. I was furious that I had been left off the PPV and I refused to allow it to happen again.
I stormed into his office like it was the beach at Normandy, but before I could get a word out he said, “Would you have a problem working an angle with Chyna?”
Chyna was six feet tall and 220 pounds of solid muscle. Chyna was a big star in the company. Chyna was the Intercontinental Champion.
Chyna was a woman.
She was at the height of her fame in the company and was working regularly with guys. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of working with her, but I wasn’t going to tell Vince that, especially since I’d been desperately waiting to work an angle with anybody. I just assumed that anybody would have a penis.
But at that point, whether it was with a man, a woman, or a hermaphrodite, any angle was better than no angle at all so I put on my best Sunday school smile and said, “Of course not, Vince! I welcome the opportunity!”
What was the big deal anyway? James Bond had to fight Grace Jones in A View to a Kill. Kurt Russell had to fight Rosario Dawson in Death Proof. Larry David had to fight Rosie O’Donnell on Curb Your Enthusiasm. So who was I to complain about fighting Chyna? How hard could it be?
Little did I know …
The night before as I watched the PPV with my paws on my proverbial pud, Chyna won the Intercontinental Championship from Jeff Jarrett. Ever since I started wrestling in the gym of Westwood Collegiate with Wallass (see the award-winning A Lion’s Tale for full details) I’d had one dream: to be the WWE Intercontinental Champion. So being in an angle with the IC Champion was huge for me—even if said champion didn’t have a set of testicles.
Vince was very specific in his instructions about working with Chyna. “Just because she’s a woman doesn’t mean you have to go easy on her. Be tough and work strong with her, because that will get her over more.”
And she was really over. Chyna was the first woman who had ever been promoted on the same level as the men, and she looked the part. She was huge and more muscular than I was, which gave her the credibility to beat up guys. She was very popular with the fans, but more importantly she was popular with the office. Plus she was also HHH’s girlfriend, which didn’t hurt her status either, as he was on his way to becoming one of the top stars in the company.
I entered into my feud with Chyna with the best of intentions. I wanted to make her look great in the ring, as I felt like Vince was issuing me a challenge to see if I could have good matches with her. I also wanted to like Chyna, but because of how she was booked and who her friends were, she had an ego and an attitude.
There were times when she was really nice and fun to be around. She had a goofy sense of humor and would do things like stick two asparaguses in the front of her mouth like fangs and talk in funny voices. But then the next day she would act weird and not say a word to me. She was hard to read—Schizo Deluxe.
I’m no doctor but it seemed to me like she was a germaphobe. She wore black leather gloves and didn’t like to touch anyone or shake hands. And she always wore vanilla-scented perfume; whenever she entered the room it smelled like a bakery.
After Chyna had beaten Jarrett for the title, I told him I was about to start an angle with her. He looked at me with compassion and said, “Good luck … you’re gonna need it.”
He wasn’t just whistling Dixie.
CHAPTER 4
Will Work for Food
Jericho vs. Chyna began on Raw in Dayton when I interrupted her mid-promo and said, “The Intercontinental Championship is one of the most illustrious championships in the history of the WWE. It’s been held by such legendary performers as Bret Hart, Ricky Steamboat, Shawn Michaels, the Mountie, but now it’s being held by a … woman! The idea of you bringing any credibility to the Intercontinental Championship is even more enhanced than your ridiculous fake breasts.” I was totally blistering her while she just stood there thunderstruck without a comeback.
I continued to insult and question her estrogen levels for the next few weeks, building up to a match for the IC title at Survivor Series in Detroit. Doing promos with her wasn’t so bad, nor was the idea of wrestling her. But when Vince told me that he wanted Chyna to go over at the PPV, I was a little taken aback.
I was going to have to lose to a girl? The thought of being pinned by her was revolting in every way, but that’s what my boss wanted, and I was going to give it to him. Chyna was an average worker at best, but knowing that she had so much political power while I was still under the microscope, I had no choice. Not only did I have to lose to her, I had to have a great match with her as well.
I went to WWE headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, to work out the details of the match with her. HHH was there as her chaperone, helping us to decide what would and what wouldn’t work. I was bound and determined to steal the show and wante
d to do everything I could to make that happen. I thought of a plethora of false finishes, including a spot where we would give each other a belly-to-belly suplex from the ring apron through the announce table. But the coup de grâce was the idea I had for the finish. She was using HHH’s Pedigree as her own and I wanted her to give it to me from the top rope. HHH nixed the majority of my ideas, saying they were unnecessary or too dangerous to try, and he was right; but the top-rope Pedigree made the cut.
HHH and I didn’t have much of a relationship at that point although Simple Jack could figure out that he didn’t really care for me. When I first came to the WWE, he gave me his phone number and said, “If you ever need anything, give me a call.” A few days later in San Jose, I didn’t know how to get to the venue, so I took him up on his offer.
“Hey man, it’s Jericho here. Do you know how to get to the arena?”
“Yeah, I know. Get a map.”
I heard the laughter of his DX cronies in the background as he hung up.
A few weeks later on Thanksgiving, DX did a bit where they went out on the streets to laugh at street people. They found a homeless man holding a sign that read WILL WORK FOR FOOD. HHH said, “Look at that guy. I bet he’s a better worker than Jericho.” The rest of DX (Road Dogg, Billy Gunn, X-Pac, and Chyna) nodded their heads and guffawed at their leader’s “rapist’s wit.” I confronted him about it later and he said with a smirk, “Yeah, I thought you’d find that funny.”
I didn’t. But I understood the relevance of the comment. It was a direct shot at me, and once again I realized if I didn’t do something to turn the tide, I’d be sent packing.
The match with Chyna at Survivor Series started out good, but halfway through it, something happened. The Detroit crowd began loudly chanting my name, not caring that she was the babyface. It was like the fans were telling Vince they were sick of the Chyna experiment and didn’t buy her getting the better of me physically. Even though the office and the locker room didn’t seem to believe in me, the people still did. The fans in Detroit were mad as hell and weren’t gonna take it anymore—but neither was Chyna.
Undisputed: How to Become World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps Page 4